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A Changed Russia Arches an Eyebrow at Putin’s Staged Antics

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin during his dive to the bottom of a bay, where he retrieved ancient ceramic jugs.Credit
Alexey Druzhinin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MOSCOW — It was just a typical summer outing for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin: Clad in a wet suit and fitted with an oxygen tank, he dived to the bottom of a bay and retrieved two ceramic jugs that dated to the sixth century A.D.

The scene, captured by a camera crew and broadcast on the nightly news, cast Mr. Putin as a broad-chested Renaissance man, just the thing for his listless approval ratings. Scenes of Mr. Putin braving the elements — tranquilizing a tigress, tenderly feeding sugar to his horse or shooting a dart at a whale from a rubber dinghy — are a staple of political life in Russia.

There have long been suspicions that his exploits were not spontaneous. Still, it was remarkable to see Mr. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri S. Peskov, surrounded by a panel of exceedingly skeptical journalists, trying to explain as delicately as possible that Mr. Putin’s much-hyped dive in August had been staged.

“Look,” Mr. Peskov said good-naturedly in the broadcast, which was released late Tuesday. “Putin did not find an amphora that had been lying on the bottom for many thousands of years. That is obvious.”

Mr. Peskov’s interview on Dozhd TV, a cheeky Web-based news channel, made this much clear: Mr. Putin is returning to the presidency in a country that has changed greatly since 2008, when he last held that post. After showy efforts to elevate his popularity, he appears to have stopped a slow decline in his approval ratings — now at 68 percent, their lowest point since 2005, according to the Levada Center.

But he has few levers to pull with influential urban elites, who are increasingly immune from the persuasive effects of social programs and government-controlled television.

Mr. Peskov knows the grumbling that is going on in the capital city, and he confronted it directly in his rare interview, saying, “We have some explaining to do.” Over all, though, his response boiled down to a hard demographic truth: Moscow may not like Mr. Putin’s return, but Russia does, and Russia is bigger.

“In Moscow we are often hearing the words, ‘Why is he coming back?’ ” Mr. Peskov said. “We frequently travel around Russia, and find the problems there are different than for those who live inside the Garden Ring,” which encircles the city center, “and who can allow themselves to spend two or three hours a day to write on blogs and social networks.”

“Sitting in Moscow, you might say: ‘It’s hard for me to breathe here; it’s stifling. I’m going to the banks of the Thames,’ ” he said later. “And there are people who are sitting concretely and saying, ‘Listen, if my taxes were three points lower, everything would work out for me and my dairy.’ This is what I mean — there are different levels of problems.”

The Kremlin has navigated between these audiences for more than a century. Lenin dismissed Moscow’s intelligentsia as “not the brain of the nation,” but “the feces of the nation,” whereas others have argued that Russia cannot be ruled without the consent of Moscow’s elite. Mr. Putin chose one thesis over the other in displacing President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who had soothed Moscow’s liberals with the hope that their ideas would take hold.

With that hope snuffed out, many have leapt to the image of Mr. Putin as a repeat of the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, whose 18 years in power became known as the Era of Stagnation. Mr. Peskov, who was clearly teed up for that question, said Tuesday that he saw the early part of the Brezhnev era as a positive model.

“People really are talking about the Brezhnevization of Putin, though this is being said by people who know absolutely nothing about Brezhnev,” Mr. Peskov said. “You know, Brezhnev is not some sort of minus for the history of our country; it is a huge plus. He laid the foundation of our economy, agriculture and so forth.”

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His remarks rippled through Russian Web sites in the morning. By afternoon the editors of Gazeta.ru, an online newspaper frequently critical of the government, said they would be on the lookout for glowing television retrospectives on Brezhnev, whose leadership, they wrote, would be associated not with turgid ideology but with “stable, peaceful, gradual growth.”

“Putin returns to power as president of an essentially Soviet majority, living within commercial and political coordinates which differ little from the Brezhnev days,” they wrote in an unsigned editorial. “For this apolitical, paternalistically oriented post-Soviet crowd, the general secretary, president or leader of the nation (this must be underlined) — is the single hope and buttress.”

In the interview, Mr. Peskov gave little sign that his boss planned to change his personalized and secretive style. He said that the president and the prime minister were the only people who knew that the reshuffle would be made public on Sept. 24, and that he personally was “dumbfounded” to hear the announcement, having expected the leaders to wait longer.

“If anyone tells you he knew about it in advance, he’s lying to you,” he said.

Asked if Mr. Putin showed emotion after firing his longtime friend and adviser, Finance Minister Aleksei L. Kudrin, Mr. Peskov said no, “not a single muscle moved in his face.” Asked if Mr. Putin had started to use the Internet, he said “rarely.” Asked if Mr. Putin would allow media access to his two adult daughters, who have virtually never been sighted in public, he said no.

“He is the same,” Mr. Peskov said. “In some cases he has become more tolerant, in some less tolerant.”

Mr. Peskov’s comments come on the heels of a televised interview with Mr. Medvedev, who said he agreed to forgo a second term because Mr. Putin was more popular. Geared toward the narrow demographic slice that looks to the Internet for news, Mr. Peskov’s comments suggest that the Kremlin has serious concern about the frustration felt by urban elites, though he could not help sounding a little irritated as he cataloged Mr. Putin’s achievements to his interviewers.

“Was there a banking panic? There was not,” he said. “Was there a default? There was not. Did we pass our strategic industries over to the ownership of foreign capital? We did not. And did we lose our sovereignty, even a little? We did not.”

“We very much want to explain it to that group of people, for whom the most interesting thing is to sit in expensive restaurants, where there is not one free table left, eat expensive Italian food costing 1,200 rubles per plate and fret about the fate of their country,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on October 6, 2011, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: A Greatly Changed Russia Arches an Eyebrow at the Staged Antics of Putin. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe